Truths Best Left Concealed
by Queen of the Castle
Summary: The Doctor inadvertently finds out a part of his future long before it's meant to happen. Which, in turn, means he has to make it happen. Sometimes the Doctor could do without the wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey part of being a time traveller.


"This watch is me," he said.

Though he heedlessly continued on with his explanation, he could tell he'd lost Martha already. What he was saying clearly wasn't making a lick of sense to her. Not that that was anything really new, what with him having a completely brilliant Time Lord brain that defied the comprehension of even the most brilliant humans, Martha included. He supposed, though, that this time it was even more inevitable than usual that she'd be a bit lost, since ... well, his explanation didn't really make any sense, period.

He'd had it in the back of his head for ages – might have been centuries by now – that the day would come that he'd have to do this. One of the hazards of being a time traveller was that one often became aware of things from one's own future, and then had to go about closing time loops so the whole universe didn't prematurely go boom. Rather tedious, all things told. He hated it when that happened. He hated knowing his own future at all, for so many reasons (he knew they'd all leave him, they always did, but knowing when and how beforehand made it nearly impossible to take them and show them the universe in the first place). He never went looking for clues about what would happen to him for that very reason.

Well, almost never.

But this time it was completely an accident. There he was flicking through a random book, and suddenly he'd had to slam it shut, his breathing becoming short to the point that his respiratory bypass almost had to kick in. It was a shock, to say the least.

Oh, the book started out innocently enough. The protagonist was a human in the 20th century named John Smith. He sometimes used that name for a reason; lots of people were called John Smith. Even a passing mention of 'the Doctor', while striking him as hugely coincidental, didn't really ring any alarm bells. It wouldn't be the first time he'd half-thought he'd stumbled across a future regeneration of himself, only to learn that 'the Doctor' was merely that person's title. As the story progressed, however, and the protagonist's wild dreams of travelling the universe were revealed, it was immediately obvious to him that it was no mere happenstance. When you lived a life as extraordinary and unique as the Doctor's, it was difficult not to recognise your own biography, even heavily paraphrased. Even when you hadn't even lived most of that biography yourself yet.

He'd been tempted, just for a moment, to pick the book back up and read on to the parts that he didn't recognise, which he hadn't yet lived. Just for a moment, mind. It was, after all, only _almost_ never that he was tempted to find out about his own future. But that, he quickly decided, would be a terrible idea. Yes, the future was always in motion, so it might not be so terribly bad if he changed some things. There could, though, be any number of things in his future that he'd want to change, but which just _shouldn't_ be altered. He knew he'd be bound to fixate on them, given the chance. Quite a large brain, him. It was hard to turn it off, even when he wanted to. He knew how much trouble that could get him into. No use inviting more.

And anyway, there would come a day when he'd have lived all the adventures contained in the book first-hand. Then there'd be no need to read it. Or, if he still wanted to, there'd certainly be no harm in it anymore. Time Lords had long lives, even him. That made patience a slightly easier concept (most of the time).

He didn't look in the book again, but as with everything else he'd ever read, part of him remembered things such as when and where the events took place and a detailed physical description of the book's main character. He couldn't see any reason why that would be changed for the purposes of writing it as fiction. After all, what would be the point in changing a description of a man – of _him_ – that was not so outlandish that it couldn't apply to millions of humanoids universe-wide (not like some of his incarnations, or at the very least some of the get-ups he'd worn)?

And then the book had been shoved to the back of the TARDIS library, almost but not quite forgotten. Until, that was, he'd looked in the mirror one Christmas day, fresh from a particularly hard regeneration, and he'd known the thing that brought about the book was somewhere just around the corner. He'd recognised himself in that mirror. In a way, at least. Not in the same way that he sometimes recognised his regenerations because he actually had met himself in person before (that was always so awkward, he tried to avoid it where possible). But still, the image in the mirror rang little bells of memory from years ago. He might push things to the back of his frankly rather massive brain, but they were never really forgotten. This was clearly finally the right incarnation.

Since he seemed to be running through regenerations like a mayfly recently, he knew that meant he had to go off to the year 1913 and have a bit of a peculiar adventure, even by his standards, as soon as possible.

Not right at that moment, though.

Initially, he decided that it couldn't be just then because he needed his companion to trust him completely for it to work, and at that stage Rose was still looking at him like she wasn't quite sure who he was. Not a Slitheen, no, they'd straightened that much out. But there was bound to be some adjustments for both of them. He had to give her a bit of time.

When he put it off a little longer despite the fact that his relationship with Rose was repaired, if not better than ever, Jackie and Rose went and made an agreement that Rose would be back for a quick visit every month. Their time, not just hers, Jackie had insisted. Either Jackie was worried that twenty-year-old Rose would disappear one day and be replaced by middle-aged Rose the next (as if he'd let that happen, missing twelve months that one time aside), or she wanted Rose to grow older at the rate she was supposed to, because Jackie still held out hope that Rose would grow tired of their life and come home to stay any day now. Though the Doctor knew they could be away for a few extra months without Jackie being any the wiser, he somehow couldn't bring himself to ask Rose to lie to her mum on his behalf yet again. Not when things between himself and Jackie were finally going so well.

And then finally, after establishing some level of trust with Jackie by actually, just as he'd promised, bringing Rose back as close to exactly monthly as he possibly could with their lives being so unconventional (which no one even congratulated him on or thanked him for), he realised that he could probably get Jackie to agree to bending the rule just once, for a good cause. But it was then, when he finally could have organised everything and gone and closed off the damned time loop and been done with it, that he realised that all the extraneous little excuses he'd been coming up with in the months since he'd regenerated were covers for the real reason he couldn't go to 1913 just then.

He had to become human, and fall enough in love with an ordinary but still dazzling woman in 1913 to entrust her with his journal. And that woman wasn't Rose.

He couldn't put her through that, knowing how she felt about him. And somehow, he couldn't see himself actually falling in love with another woman with Rose right there either. Yes, his awareness of her would only be residual, if that, once he was human, but that didn't stop the human him from forming an attachment to her. And he really rather thought he would, because Rose Tyler was magnificent. What man in his right mind wouldn't fall in ...

Well. Wouldn't care for her, he meant.

And then, much much too quickly, Rose was gone. _Gone._

For almost a year after that he didn't even think of 1913 once. He had other things on his mind. Things which were Rose- or Gallifrey-shaped, often, and at other times alien-shaped (which was to say, wildly assorted, often startling, and always, at least to him, beautiful shapes). All of that was certainly enough to keep him occupied enough that he barely spared a journal he'd discovered years, decades, centuries (just because he was a Time Lord didn't mean he kept that much track of just how much time had passed since every little thing that happened to him) ago.

Anyway, for a time he had no travelling companion, and that was rather an essential ingredient of having the whole turning-himself-human thing reversed. Then he all of a sudden had Martha Jones travelling with him, but that was only temporary, and that wouldn't do. And then it wasn't so temporary any more, but still it didn't occur to him that this companion, and this time, was quite right for the trip he must take.

Then the Family of Blood came along. And, he thought, to hell with it. It had to be done sometime, and here was an honest _excuse_ to finally do it. Perhaps it wouldn't be just a matter of doing it because he knew he had to. Making his companion go through months of putting up with him as a human seemed a disproportionate price to pay just to make sure some book was written, after all. But there and then, perhaps his becoming human could actually save lives. And even though he wasn't entirely sure that Martha was the _perfect_ companion to ask to do this for him, given the somewhat precarious nature of their relationship, she'd already proven herself to be loyal and brilliant. All things considered, what else could he ask for?

So he told the TARDIS to take him to 1913 to Farringham School, where a woman named Joan Redfern was completely unaware that she was waiting for him. And he set up the Chameleon Circuit to make him human. While those two things did not perhaps ensure that he – as a human man with no memory of what must be done – would fall in love with one Joan Redfern, he thought on the balance of probabilities that things would most likely work out that way. After all, as a lonely human man he'd probably be looking for love. And really, it was an all-boys boarding school in 1913. How many eligible and unmarried women would be milling about for him to gravitate towards?

So. "This watch is me," he said to Martha, and left her a bunch of instructions that he knew very well would not be necessarily all that helpful when he did go about getting attached to his life as a human.

Then all was pain and darkness and just the occasional hint of the outside world when the watch that housed his consciousness was opened for brief snatches of time.

When he came back to himself, he realised a number of things hadn't gone quite right. He'd broken Joan Redfern's heart, but that could never have been helped. It was necessary, and he'd already known that was going to happen. He'd also, however, been the cause of multiple deaths in the village; Joan was quite right in calling him out on his culpability for those. And he'd realised that the fact that he hadn't taken Rose with him on this adventure hadn't prevented him from breaking yet another companion's heart. He was always so careless with those.

But perhaps most importantly, if he was to be selfish about it (and he thought he might have earned that much just that once), he realised that he hadn't been at all prepared for how much he would, even back to being the Doctor once more, crave that wonderful life on the slow path that John Smith might have had with Joan Redfern and their family. It didn't hurt as much as the loss of Gallifrey; nothing ever would. It didn't even make his hearts ache quite as much as leaving Rose on a beach in Norway in the wrong universe. But it was a hurt that he felt could and should have been avoided, and not just for his sake.

Sometimes he hated how convoluted travelling through time made his life. Just sometimes, but there it was.

Reading the rest of _The Journal of Impossible Things_, finally, had been fairly bitter. There was the Time War, his planet burning, detailed on the page of a book written by a human woman who could never understand the significance, as told by a man who hadn't realised it was anything but a story. He'd considered throwing the damn thing out of the TARDIS airlock for a moment, before remembering that the TARDIS didn't have an airlock. He did, however, hang on to it in the end.

It may not have provoked many happy memories, but it was a poignant reminder of how the wibbly-wobbliness of time could come around to bite him if he wasn't careful.

A few years later, dying, he'd taken the time to have the book signed, to catch a glimpse of Joan Redfern's legacy before his regeneration further distanced him from the feelings still attached to his memory of her. Joan had never been able to properly mourn John Smith, for he was not truly dead and there was no body to bury. Similarly, the Doctor had found it difficult to mourn John Smith's love for Joan, because he _wasn't_ John Smith, even though in a way he also sort of was. He hoped that saying goodbye now, even if it wasn't quite like saying goodbye to her directly, might lessen the pain of it just a little.

It should have made him feel better about the whole thing to know that Joan was happy in the end. Perhaps it did, a little, but barely enough to notice.

"Were you?" Verity Newman asked him.

He studied her, noting how much like her great-grandmother she looked. Had John Smith been able to lead the full and love-filled life he'd given up so that the Doctor could save the day, the woman sitting before him would not be there to ask that question.

He gave her a sad smile, because what else could he do?

He may have been rude, and he may have been dying, but even then, he couldn't bring himself to tell a woman that he might have been a lot happier had she and her book never existed.

~FIN~


End file.
